Prescription drug abuse fight renewed

Abuse of prescription drugs is the fastest growing cause of accidental death in North Carolina. Fortunately local health officials are moving aggressively to combat the trend.

More than 1,100 people in North Carolina died of unintentional poisoning in 2011 and 80 percent of those deaths were related to prescription drugs, mostly painkillers, according to the N.C. Injury and Violence Prevention Branch. Figures for 2012 indicate a continuing increase.

Elsewhere, the figures are just as grim. In 2008, the last year for which national figures are available, 36,000 people died of drug overdoses and most of them were because of prescription drugs. Each day, 100 more die.

North Carolina's rate of 11.7 deaths per 100,000 people puts it roughly in the middle among the 50 states. We get no consolation from that.

North Carolina is fighting back with Project Lazarus, a broad-based program that already is showing results in Wilkes County and has been started in Polk County. Other counties will be added in the future.

The idea behind Project Lazarus is to take a community-wide approach, according to Fred Wells Brason III, the project's CEO. One aspect is teaching people how to properly store and dispose of prescription drugs. Another is to assure that treatment options are available.

Other aspects include better tracking of prescriptions, improvements in pain diagnosis and availability of antidotes for police and firefighters to use on overdose victims.

Rural counties have been especially prone to prescription-drug abuse because of the combination of high unemployment, large numbers of people with painful injuries and a lot of people with depression, what Brason calls "a perfect storm." People who would never dream of using heroin or cocaine will overuse pain killers, he said.

Additionally, "in many of our rural communities, treatment is very much lacking, the access, obstacles. And stigma is always a problem," Brason said.

One clear need is to impress on people that they should not let others use their prescriptions. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 55 percent of prescription-drug abusers got the drugs free from friends or relatives and another 11 percent bought them from friends or relatives.

CDC advocates various steps to more effectively monitor the use of prescription drugs, including watching for providers who appear to be overprescribing. A particular target is rouge "pill mills" such as the ones that have been operating in Florida.

It is hardly a coincidence that the increase is drug-related deaths occurred while the availability of prescription pain-killers such as OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin was increasing rapidly, as reported in a Trust for America's Health report.

In 2007, Wilkes County had the third highest rate in the nation of death from accidental drug overdoses. The rate has fallen sharply since the start of Project Lazarus.

"In Wilkes County, they had shown strong success rates, and it's also a model that we felt like if implemented in a regional approach could make a huge impact on not only quality of care but in reducing the drug overdose death rate," said Elizabeth Flemming of Mountain Area Health Education Center.

MAHEC is working with 16 other counties in Western North Carolina. The project is funded by a federal grant which also is being used to create integrated care centers for people with chronic pain.

In addition to MAHEC, Community Care of North Carolina has received funding to expand the reach of bring Project Lazarus.

This effort comes none too soon. For decades the battle against drug abuse has centered on street-corner sales and other drug "markets" while one of the greatest dangers was lurking in our medicine cabinets.

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Prescription drug abuse fight renewed

Abuse of prescription drugs is the fastest growing cause of accidental death in North Carolina. Fortunately local health officials are moving aggressively to combat the trend.